This ship arrived…and came timely to prevent very great distress.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO BRIDGET KINGDON, 7 MARCH 1791
Convict ship Scarborough was no place for a gentleman’s daughter. Elizabeth Macarthur was cold, pregnant and bone-weary. The Southern Ocean pummelled the ship with storm after storm and her soldier husband and infant son were both grievously ill. Elizabeth prayed.
Somewhere on that roaring sea, exhausted by her nursing duties, and constantly pitched and tumbled, Elizabeth was ‘thrown into premature labour, & delivered of a little Girl who lived but for an hour.’1 There was no one on Scarborough to help. No other women were on board, and the ship’s surgeon was unlikely to have been sober, let alone skilled. We only know of the nameless baby’s existence from a single line in a letter Elizabeth wrote to her mother, many months later. There is no record of a shipboard funeral, no record of where the small bundle wrapped in weighted canvas was delivered to the sea, and no record of Elizabeth’s grief. All we have—all Elizabeth had—is that single tragic hour.
Weeks later, on the final days of June 1790, Scarborough and her Second Fleet sister ship Neptune limped into Port Jackson. Within the immense harbour dense green-grey scrub grew down to the water’s edge, interrupted by rocky headlands, reedy swamps and some bright sandy crescents. Thin columns of smoke flagged the presence of local inhabitants, discomfortingly close, in the newcomer’s eyes, to the settlement at Sydney Cove.
Elizabeth gathered her family close. Eighteen-month-old Edward had survived the voyage, albeit sickly and undersized. Husband John had, since they left their Cape Town stopover some two months before, been ‘attack’d with a violent, & very alarming Fever; it continued to rage until every sense was lost, & every faculty but life destroyed’.2 But he could now walk unaided and was able to see for himself the destination he’d chosen for his family.
In October of the previous year, a month before boarding the ship, Elizabeth wrote to her mother about what she had read of Britains’s newest colony. ‘We learn that Wheat which has been sown flourished in a manner nearly incredible, and that the Settlers are making rapid progress in building; so that by the time our Corps arrives everything will be made comfortable for their reception.’3 Nothing was further from the truth. All reports of the colony that had filtered back to London were written within months of the First Fleet’s arrival in January 1788. These accounts were full of optimism and hope and based on little evidence. The grim reality, though, was clear to those eyeing the shore from Scarborough’s deck.
On the evening of Monday 28 June 1790, the Neptune and Scarborough transports anchored off Garden Island, well inside the harbour. The following morning a cable was run from each ship’s capstan to the shore, fastened to a sturdy tree, and then the ship was winched to its anchorage. As she approached the much-vaunted township Elizabeth can only have despaired. Town was in fact too grand a term for the motley collection of huts and tents, tree stumps and rutted, muddy tracks. Many of the marines she could see onshore were without shoes, their faces gaunt, the remnants of their uniforms too large for their emaciated frames. The Macarthurs had risked everything to come here—there could be no going back.
The thirteen hundred or so colonists were teetering on the edge of starvation. Attempts at growing crops had largely failed and the foodstuffs brought in the holds of the First Fleet ships were now at least three years rancid and running low. Governor Phillip had introduced strict rationing, and theft of food was punishable by death. Many convicts were too weak to work (indeed some were said to have died of starvation), and those remaining made meagre progress building the roads, houses, stores and offices that would eventually turn the campsite into a town. Few colonies in the British Empire were as abject and miserable as the settlement Sydney Cove.
When Lady Juliana, the first ship of the Second Fleet, was sighted three weeks earlier on 3 June, the colony’s reaction was predictably ecstatic. ‘Every countenance was instantly cheered, and wore the lively expressions of eagerness, joy, and anxiety,’ wrote bureaucrat David Collins, ‘the whole settlement was in motion and confusion.’4 Watkin Tench, a marine officer and diarist, opened the door of his hut ‘and saw several women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other, and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness…My next door neighbour, a brother-officer, was with me, but we could not speak. We wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing.’5
With her cargo of some two hundred female convicts, Lady Juliana brought valuable commodities—news and women. Governor Phillip was less than thrilled with the practical uselessness of the latter (‘many of them appeared to be loaded with the infirmities incident to old age’6), but was deeply relieved when, two weeks later the store ship Justinian arrived. The survival of the colony was ensured, at least in the short term, and he immediately ordered that the full food ration be restored. The news, however, was just as much appreciated. Letters from home ‘were torn open in trembling agitation’, wrote Tench. ‘News burst upon us like meridian splendour on a blind man. We were overwhelmed with it: public, private, general, and particular. Nor was it until some days had elapsed, that we were able to methodise it, or reduce it into form.’7 There was King George’s illness and his happy return to health; the French revolution; and the fate of HMS Guardian, fully laden with stores, which should have arrived three months earlier but had struck an iceberg in the Southern Ocean. But the colonists also learnt of the imminent arrival of three more transports—a thousand more hungry convict mouths to feed and nowhere to house them. Elizabeth Macarthur’s Scarborough was one of these ships.
Scarborough and her captain, John Marshall, had made the trip with the First Fleet two years before. Marshall had left behind his Newfoundland dog, Hector. Now, the dog was so pleased to be reunited with its master that it leapt into the water and, to the delight of onlookers, swam out to the ship.8 Governor Phillip’s welcome was somewhat less warm. Even having longed for the arrival of ships from home for so long, the existing colonists found it hard to muster enthusiasm for Scarborough, Neptune and (a few days later and carrying a broken mast) Surprize. As well as convicts, these three ships carried the incoming soldiers and officers of the newly formed New South Wales Corps. Governor Phillip’s marines were to be sent home, replaced by army men. This was to cause much ill-feeling. Marines, despite often looking and acting like soldiers, were in fact part of the Royal Navy, and routinely took orders from their ship’s captain. Soldiers, however, operated within a completely separate arm of the English defence forces and answered only to their own superior officers. As a career officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, Phillip knew the difficulties of combined army and navy operations: the jealousies, the divided councils, the arguments over precedence. Even though Phillip was not now commanding vessels at sea, the maintenance of sound discipline remained a matter of life or death for them all—only now the main danger lay in being overthrown by the convicts rather than by a rogue wave.
Governor Phillip presumably met the incoming officers and received them formally at Government House—a grand name for the only two-storey building in the settlement. Phillip was introduced to his new subordinates: Captain Nicholas Nepean, the Corps’ commanding officer in the absence of the Regimental Commander; Nepean’s second in command Captain William Hill; and the lieutenants, including John Macarthur, and Macarthur’s twenty-three-year-old wife Elizabeth, the only officer’s wife to make the journey.
The Macarthur family was allocated a hut after the senior officers Nepean and Hill had chosen theirs. Exactly who had to move out of the hut in order to accommodate the Macarthurs, or their feelings about doing so, is not recorded. Nor are Elizabeth’s thoughts about her new home. John Macarthur’s superior officer, Captain Hill, did however, record his own thoughts about the situation, in a letter to a friend in England:
Here I am, living in a miserable thatched hut, without kitchen, without a garden, with an acrimonious blood by my having been nearly six months at sea, and tho’ little better than a leper obliged to live on a scanty pittance of salt provision, without a vegetable, except when a good-natured neighbour robs his own stomach in compassion to me.9
Then began the urgent task of unloading the convicts. The ships spewed forth a cargo of filth and misery. ‘The landing of these people was truly affecting and shocking,’ wrote the Reverend Johnson, first chaplain of the settlement, ‘great numbers were not able to walk, nor to move hand or foot; such were slung over the ship side in the same manner as they would sling a cask or box or anything of that nature. Upon their being brought up to the open air, some fainted, some died upon deck, and others in the boat before they reached the shore.’ Johnson went aboard the Surprize and was appalled. Many of the men had neither bedding nor clothes, and they were ‘unable to turn, or help themselves’. Johnson tried to speak to them as he passed along ‘but the smell was so offensive I could scarcely bear it’. He then boarded the Scarborough to again go down among the convicts, but Captain Marshall dissuaded him. ‘The Neptune,’ wrote Johnson, ‘was still more wretched and intolerable and therefore never attempted it.’10
Of the one thousand or so convicts sent out in the Second Fleet, 273 did not survive the journey. Those who died after their ships entered Port Jackson were flung overboard, and their unweighted corpses washed up on the shore. Governor Phillip was furious with the captains, wrote one of the convict women of the Lady Juliana: ‘I heard him say it was murdering them.’11 Phillip’s dispatches back to England were, however, far more circumspect. Nearly half the convicts were landed sick: ‘Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried upon the backs of others.’12 The rest were lean and emaciated.13
The hospital could hold no more than eighty, at a pinch, so tents were hurriedly erected. Each one held up to four men who lay on the damp ground with a single blanket to share, although the strongest would often take it for himself. Reverend Johnson continued to be dismayed. ‘Some were exercised with violent fevers, and others with a no less violent purging and flux. [Many] were covered over almost with their own nastiness, their heads, bodies, cloths, blanket, all full of filth and lice.’14 The store ship Justinian contained the materials for a portable field hospital, but it comprised 602 pieces of wood and copper, and it took nearly six days to erect. It probably made no difference. Antiseptics and sanitary hospital practices would not be widely adopted for almost another hundred years so the hospital was in reality little more than a marquee staffed by ill-qualified surgeons and inexpert convict nurses. Of the 486 convicts listed sick, 124 would die in hospital.15 The rest took weeks and months to recover, if indeed they ever did.
By way of comparison, six per cent of the convicts aboard the First Fleet died on the journey, the Third Fleet lost nine per cent and within ten years the death rate aboard convict transports was consistently around two per cent. The Second Fleet masters responsible for the inexcusable conditions on their ships blithely proceeded to set up shop almost as soon as they arrived. Articles of ‘grocery, glass, millinery, perfumery, and stationery’16 were offered at extortionate prices and, according to a disgusted Tench, were eagerly bought up by the colonists.17
These were Elizabeth’s first days in the colony—filled with horror, dashed hopes and despair. What a bad bargain she had made, trading solace and safety in England for a precarious and unpredictable future on the edge of the world. For this she had left behind her family and friends—and a daughter out there in her ocean grave. It would be a rare individual who did not think about the lost comforts of home.